


That's What Best Friends Do

by clarketomylexa



Series: clexaweek2019 [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Clexa Week 2019, F/F, F/M, Idiots in Love, Only One Bed, complete dumbasses who like each other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-06 12:25:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17939678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarketomylexa/pseuds/clarketomylexa
Summary: Clarke has been taking Lexa to her family's lake house for the summer for as long as they she can remember. Puberty, however, and an utter lack of My Little Pony pyjamas brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘there’s only one bed’.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The second part of this is already written, I just wanted to split it up because it was so long and I am thinking of writing a third part to round it out if anyone is interested!

 They meet in the first grade.

Lexa is sweet and Clarke thinks she is cool in her own quirky way. She moves in on a Sunday and she stands on the other side of the picket fence as they talk, in a green sweatshirt with tiny, little pugs on it and one leg of her denim overalls rolled an inch higher than the other, rainbow piñata socks on show underneath scuffed up sneakers. Her hair is braided into a crown around her head—a style that Clarke files away among what Octavia likes to call a ‘fishtail braid’ and how to tie her shoelaces for later—and she has a scar above her top lip that Clarke imagines she got doing something exotic.

She’s so much cooler than the kids in her grade that Clarke almost wants to yell out how unfair it is that she won’t be going to her school in the Spring.

“But Oakside is so far away,” she laments, hands fidgeting with the Barbie doll tucked beneath her arm. Most of the kids her age in their cul-de-sac go to Ridgeview. Privately Clarke thinks Octavia is the only one worth talking to though, because she has it on good authority that Miller picks his nose and Bellamy just tries too hard.

 She isn’t allowed to tell people that though so she watches Lexa shrug.

“My cousin goes there.”

Abby calls her from the porch a moment later and Clarke is forced to say goodbye to her new friend to wash up for sinner. She thrusts the topless Barbie over the fence in a form of peace offering—Lexa’s eyes bulge out of her head and Clarke wonders if she’s never seen a Barbie before so she makes a mental note to invite Lexa over to play with them—and tells Lexa with the utmost importance that she will talk to her tomorrow.

“I made a new friend today,” she tells Abby and Jake from her stool by the kitchen sink as she methodically washes her hands like the chart tacked to the wall tells her to. Jake says she’s a ‘sociable child’ which Clarke thinks is adult speak for ‘will talk to anything that moves’ because once she made friends with a duck in the park that had one leg and an eye that didn’t open. But if being ‘sociable’ means she can talk to Lexa again Clarke will accept the title gladly.

When she closes her eyes she can see Lexa’s pretty braid and the way her eyes aren’t quite one colour but not two either. Like what would happen in art class when Clarke mixed turquoise and forest green together on her plastic pallet because she was using what Miss Henry called ‘artistic license’. Maybe God or whatever Bellamy’s new theory on who created the universe used their ‘artistic license’ when they were making Lexa too.

It makes an awful lot of sense when she thinks about it.

“Clarke you’re wasting water,” Abby reminds her, ferrying pasta bake and green salad from the island to the table and Clarke dries her hands obediently and tucks her stool into the scullery to claim her chair.

“Her name is Lexa,” she continues. “She has piñatas on her socks. She lives next door.”

“The Shepard house sold?” Jake asks.

Abby nods. “I met the new owners at the open house last month. She’s a lawyer,” she looks at Jake in the way Clarke has noticed her parents do when they are talking about ‘parent things’. “I don’t think he’s in the picture anymore.”

“What picture?” Clarke pipes up, distracted as she uses the spoon to scrape the cheesy, bread crumb topping from the side of the dish. She likes drawing. Her favourite is when they finish their worksheets quickly on Friday afternoons and her teacher tells them to bring a piece of paper and a book to lean on, and takes them to the playground to draw the plants and the bugs. The boys in her class spend the time throwing sticks at each other but Clarke always finds a corner to tuck herself into and a lady bug to examine.

She likes the colours.

“Your Mom means that Lexa’s Dad doesn’t live with her anymore,” Jake explains. He takes the spoon from Clarke and scoops the stuck piece of pasta bake onto her plate before topping it up with salad and ignoring the way she frowns at the limp lettuce leaves.

Thinking on it, Clarke nods without ceremony. “If Lexa’s Mom’s a lawyer,” she posits, “can she arrest Nate for stealing my gel pens?”

Nate sits across from her in art class and has a habit of stealing her stationary when he thinks she isn’t looking because he likes colouring his notebooks with sparkles. It’s annoying because she refuses to tell on him and Abby says she doesn’t want to buy her more if they are going to continue to go missing so she has to resort to using Octavia’s ones without the good smelling scents.

“I don’t think that’s how it works, honey,” Abby laughs.

“That’s prob’ly for the best,” Clarke smacks her lips in thought, “he sticks them up his nose.”

Clarke invites Lexa over two days later to play with her Barbies and Lexa sits on her lawn in a bright pink long-sleeve with patches shaped like fried eggs on the elbows and socks that have milk and cookies on them.

When she jokes that Lexa is wearing her breakfast, Lexa smiles so wide Clarke thinks the world will split in two.

* * *

 She invites Lexa to the lake three months later.

It’s a five hour drive to the house that has been in Jake’s family since he was Clarke’s age but it’s one that they take every twenty-second of June when Abby has cover at the surgery. The house is big and old, with a deck and a new paint job and big windows that overlook the lake. If you squint on a clear day, you can see the proud, white facades of the houses on the other side with their boat sheds, trellises and peaked roofs.

A jetty sits in the water and a tree clings to the bank with a tire-swing Jake had fastened to the middle-most branch—against Abby’s better judgement but she never can stop her husband when he has one of his ideas—so that when you stand as far as you can up the bank and let go you can fly out far enough not to touch the bottom of the lake. It’s Clarke’s favourite thing since she learnt how to do a handstand on the side of the garage.   

Not that Clarke has to sell it really, because after three months of Barbie Dream house in the front yard Lexa is nodding as soon as she mentions it would mean spending the summer with her. She explains diligently that there is a double bed in the room Clarke usually stays in—because Abby said that sometimes people don’t like sleeping in the same bed as other people—but that they can sleep in the bunk room instead, or Jake can pull the trundle bed out.

Lexa just nods.  

She is fairly sure that is she asked Lexa to jump off a cliff, she would walk straight off it, piñata socks and all but then Clarke would miss her too much.

She stands on the Griffin’s porch on the morning of the twenty-second, in cactus socks and second-hand short-alls—the pants cut down to her size—with funky patches sewn into the bib, thumbs working their way under the straps of her backpack as her mom thanks Abby profusely.   

She’s a pretty lady, with Lexa’s smile and round glasses who looks both flustered and relieved as she sweeps a hand over her daughter’s forehead and admits in a way Clarke knows she is supposed to pretend not to listen to that Lexa is having trouble making friends. Which Clarke thinks is ridiculous because Lexa is sweet and funny. She wears her hair like a crown and has been rolling the legs of her pants up at different lengths for three months because Clarke said she thought it was cool.

Clarke’s chest aches when Lexa won’t look up from the tips of her shoes and she thinks that Lexa’s mom mustn’t know what she’s talking about.

* * *

 Clarke has been doing multiplication in math.

She knows that two and two is four, and three and three is six.

And if that’s true then she thinks Lexa and summer must equal something like ‘better than good’—but not ‘bestest’ because Lexa says ‘best’ is already a superlative.

Clarke doesn’t know what a superlative is, but Lexa can define words like ‘diversification’ so she thinks Lexa must be right.

They swim until water rattles in their ears and Jake teaches them to fish off the jetty after they stand on stools to help him pull the rods down from a shelf in the boat house, carefully showing them how to thread the bait onto the hook and cast the line into the water. When Lexa can’t get her hands around the line, face contorting unhappily, Jake heaves her onto his lap and repeats the process patiently until her frumpy frown straightens out.

They go out on the boat on hot days; Jake makes the boat corkscrew so that the water froths out in a V behind them, and when Clarke begs, he flings them writhing and giggling into the water by the strap of their life-jackets and fishes them out again while Abby rolls her eyes.

It’s in the quiet moments though, when the lie on the grass in damp swim suits and sunscreen-sticky skin, that Clarke discovers two very important things.

The first: Lexa does this thing when she is happy where she scrunches her eyes and throws her head back to laugh and it’s so ‘positively lovely’—which is another thing that Lexa says a lot—that Clarke makes it her mission to make her happy every day of her life.       
The second: every time Lexa is happy, it makes Clarke feel ten feet tall. It’s a feeling that starts in her toes, ticking the soles of her feet and shooting like growing pains up her legs until her stomach is hot and her cheeks are pink and she feels stronger than before. She is pretty sure that if she were to climb the tallest tree on the bank and let go, she would fly and not fall.

She thinks about it as she sits, chin sticky with lemonade popsicle on the jetty.

Lexa lays sprawled on her back, legs akimbo and arms stretched out into the sky. Her fingers are splayed and her whole face is contorted so that she can squint up at the sky and trap the sun in the circle of her fingers. She has freckles peeking out shyly from the bridge of her nose and when she notices Clarke staring, she drops her hand and smiles. It’s lopsided—like her pant legs and her socks—but it’s whole in a way that makes Clarke’s stomach flip-flop.   

“Want to see something cool?” she pokes Lexa in the soft of her ribs with her pointer finger.

Lexa nods, pushing herself up onto her elbows, intrigued, “uh huh.”

She folds her legs and cocks her head. Clarke makes sure she is watching before she picks her way up the jetty, where the grassy verge tangles with the roots and rocks.

The tire swing is tucked over a low branch—at her mom’s request because technically Clarke isn’t supposed to use it without ‘adult supervision’ but Lexa talks like an adult sometimes with her ‘therefore’ and ‘henceforth’, so she thinks it will be okay—and stands on a rock that juts out into the water with one leg, reaching out with the other until she can feel the tire under her fingers. Grinning, she pulls it into her hands and hooks a leg over the rope, taking three steps back and launching herself off the bank.

She lets go when the tire is just about to swing back like Jake taught her and surfaces just out of the shallows, hair in her eyes and heart thumping against the cage of her chest. When her ears unclog, Lexa is whooping and the jetty bends and gives beneath her uncoordinated victory dance.

“I can go higher,” Clarke garbles, mouth full of water.

Lexa’s whole face shoots upwards in disbelief. “Cannot,” she says.  
“Can to,” Clarke insists, arms flailing as she doggy-paddles inelegantly to the shore.

Their life jackets are hooked over the railing of the deck and it crosses Clarke’s mind that maybe she should go and get hers, but if she does Abby will see her through the kitchen window and she gave them instructions not to go in the water when she went in to put lunch together.

She fishes the tire swing towards her and steps back as far as the rope will go this time, rooting her toes firmly in the soggy grass. Lexa is staring at her in wide-eyed apprehension but Clarke sets her brow until it furrows above her eyes and her stomach whooshes out from under her as she kicks off the bank, mud stuck between her toes.

It dawns on her when the air is whining in her ears that maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

Her foot catches and before she understand what is happening she is careening back towards the bank, heart stuck in her mouth.

Lexa lets out a sharp yelp, as Clarke’s hand slips. She lands face down in the dirt, the air punched out of her chest, still for a moment until pain blooms across her right cheek and a cry escapes her mouth before she can recognise it as hers. She hears a shout when her ears stop ringing, and rolls with a hard gasp onto her back as Lexa’s head and shoulders swim into her vision, awful worry crunching her face. She pets Clarke’s hair as Clarke blinks up at the sky, voice trembling as she coos ‘it’s okay, Clarke’ and ‘I’m here, Clarke’ in a high, thin voice that Clarke can’t help but think is less soothing and more unsettling, until the thick goo that seems to be sitting on her lungs seeps away and she can breathe.

But then her mom appears—all grumpy line in the place of her mouth—wiping her hands on her pants as she squats on the grass and Clarke thinks she is going to puke all over again.

“Mom,” she squeaks, whining as the right side of her face throbs hotly.

Abby takes one look at her—wet swimsuit and lank hair, blood pooling beneath her eye and Lexa’s hand squeezed tightly in a balled fist—and tsks, tucking a hand under her to sit her up and Clarke sways before falling into her chest, whining ‘it hurts’ into the soft neckline of her shirt.   

The first-aid kit is found and Abby asserts that it won’t need stitches.

She gets a talking to about not doing what she’s told—which Lexa stands through too, fingers wound through Clarke’s in a way that makes it hard to focus on why ‘insubordination’ is a bad thing—and she wears a hulk band-aid on the bony jut of her cheek for a week.

Lexa traces it with a feather-light finger as the lie, side-by-side in the double bed beneath the lazy turn of the ceiling fan in the room that has been Clarke’s since she was three years old. She wears llama pyjamas and is unapologetic about not wanting to sleep on the trundle bed Jake offers to make up for her, instead, pressing herself into Clarke to feel for the bump of the scab forming under the band-aid with a frown in the way that makes warmth curl under Clarke’s ribs.

“I did it on purpose,” Clarke says, eager for anything to get rid of the crunch between Lexa’s eyebrows. She wants to reach out and touch it but her hands shake so she doesn’t.

Lexa blinks slowly, “nuh uh,” she says without heat.

“Did to,” Clarke fists her hand under her chin and nudges Lexa’s nose with her own. She smells like bubble-gum toothpaste and the Griffin’s shower-gel and the wonderful notion that Lexa is hers wafts in her mind until she can’t help but smile. “Now I match you.”

Lexa reaches up to touch the shallow half-circle above her top lip like she’s forgotten about it, fingers tapping her teeth for a minute before she shakes her head. “Yours is cooler,” she says definitively, “I got mine falling off my bike,” she explains, “you got yours flying.”

Lexa smiles her world-splitting smile and Clarke thinks that while swimming and the fireworks Jake sets off for the Fourth of July are all well and good, bedtime might be better. It’s a secret she will take to the grave along with how she only pretends not to like broccoli but the stripy wallpaper and floral sheets of the room feel impenetrable and Clarke builds them a fortress out of cotton sheets and shadows cast from soft lamp-light; a place where Lexa is hers.

She wraps her fist around the top of the sheet and pull sit over their heads until they are breathing the same hot air.

“You’re my best friend,” she says wondering why her throat gets hot and tight as she does so. The words have been sitting on her chest since the day they met—a secret locked tight like the acorns she keeps in the sticker decorated box beneath her bed that is so true she feels it in her bones every time Lexa talks.

Lexa’s eyes go big. For a horrible second, Clarke thinks that it was the wrong thing to say and her stomach flip-flops but not in the way she has come accustomed to it doing when she is around Lexa—this flip-flop feels like the warning kind that comes before Clarke has to go in search for her mom in the middle of the night because she ate too much ice-cream in one go and it winds itself into a knot so tight the only way out is up. But then, Lexa mumbles ‘best friend’ under her breath like she wants to taste it and nods, smiling so warmly Clarke wants to wrap herself up in it like a blanket and never crawl out.

“I’ve never had a best friend,” she admits, cowering behind the words like they will change Clarke’s mind. When Clarke doesn’t reply, she peers at her intently and Clarke recognises the look that she gets when she is helping Clarke with her addition and subtraction worksheets. “Is it different from just being a friend?”

Clarke thinks about it for a moment.

“Yes,” she eventually lands on, “and no.” Lexa nods. “It just means more,” Clarke whispers, “it just makes it more special.”

“Okay, then,” Lexa decides.  “You’re my best friend too.”

Lexa is soft when she sleeps. With her admission she goes limp like pasta when you put it in the pot and Clarke manoeuvres her happily, all gangly limbs and knobbly joints, until she can tangle them together like a puzzle—the kind that isn’t meant to unravel—and when Abby comes to check on them, if it weren’t for the different colours of their pyjamas, she wouldn’t know where one girl started and the other ended.     

* * *

 They talk during the year but it isn’t the same.

Lexa gives Clarke a pair of socks for her birthday with tiny little sloths embroidered into them—Clarke knows they cost her whole allowance and for that it means the world. She presents them with as much importance as when she knighted Clarke in the woods behind the lake house with an old plank of timber they found in the shed and she hangs over the fence every day after school with her lopsided smile and embroidered overalls, telling Clarke about the books she reads and her nine-year-old cousins shenanigans until her mom calls her in.

Sometimes, when Lexa’s mom is working she stays at Clarke’s on Saturday nights and on those days, Clarke can almost pretend it’s summer. They stand on stools in the kitchen side-by-side as Jake stirs the pasta sauce and lie in Clarke’s twin bed at night, watching the glow-in-the-dark stars. But Lexa is all angles unfortunately—she looks forlorn whenever someone mentions it to her, but Abby insists that she will grow into her lankiness—and while in summer it provides places for Clarke to tuck herself into comfortably, during the year, the positions she has to contort them into to make them fit clench at her chest.

She presses sloppy kisses to Lexa’s forehead to tries and convince herself otherwise, but Clarke comes to the conclusion that Lexa isn’t hers during the year when Lexa regretfully turns down an invitation to go bowling when Jake offers to take her, Octavia and Bellamy one Friday night.

She stares at her toes when she tells Clarke that her mom said no and she looks so much like the snail that Clarke found on the back path without its shell one morning that she pester her for more information.

Two weeks later, Clarke has to say no to backyard pizza with Lexa and her mom because of Octavia’s seventh birthday party—a slumber party that ends at eight when they all inevitably fall from their sugar highs that Lexa isn’t invited to despite Clarke’s best efforts.

Octavia doesn’t like Lexa. She says she’s ‘too colourful’ with her stripy shirts and rainbow patches even after Clarke explains her theory about ‘artistic license’ and Clarke thinks it’s a horrible reason not to like someone. When she asks her mom Abby tells her that Octavia is probably feeling left out and Clarke thinks that maybe, she isn’t Lexa’s during the year either.

The thought is so distressing, she lies awake with it at night, raggedy Ann doll squeezed under her armpit as she stares at the spot where the wall meets the ceiling. She twists her finger over the woollen curls.

Summer is four months away but suddenly, it becomes the center of her universe.

* * *

 Clarke is nine years old and Abby has set them loose to play in the thatch of trees beside the house.

They pick through the leaves in shorts and t-shirts while their bathing suits dry over the railing and play catch with the neighbour kids until they are flush faced and breathless. Lexa wears popcorn socks beneath her sneakers and Clarke slips a hand, fingers splayed, over her mouth to mask the sound of her heavy breathing as they crouch in a heavy crush of limbs behind a tree. They are pressed so close together Clarke can feel the rapid pat-pat of her heart and when the Monty and Jasper run past in a flurry of kicked-up leaves and pine needles, Lexa licks a wet stripe across Clarke’s cupped palm with a fierce brand of mischief in her eyes until Clarke squeals away.

They spend the rest of the afternoon as the taggers but Clarke can’t find it in herself to complain.

The next day tag becomes boring and they think of a new game.

Clarke remembers the story book that she packed in preparation for the lazy hours her and Lexa were sure to spend lounging on the grass—a thick tome her grandmother gifted her for Christmas completed with the words ‘For Clarke’ scrawled inside the front cover in her thin, looped writing that Clarke equated to the threads of the spiderwebs that hung from the beams in the shed. It contains everything from fairy tales to folklore.

She lays it on the picnic table and points to the characters illustrated in battle garb, assigning one to each of them.

Clarke is the sky princess, thrust from her cloud-top home—Olympus, Lexa corrects her quietly, pointing to the illustration of a tall, columned building gleaming atop the point of a high mountain. Her inspiration comes from a short story about a boy named Hercules that Clarke knows nothing about except for the fact that she dimly remembers watching a Disney movie about a boy who was half-god and half-human and had an angry goat instead of parents. She drapes a strip of gauzy fabric over her shoulders rummaged from the depths of the house, a dress-up left over from her aunts’ childhood summers, and threads flowers through her hair, feeling suitably wispy and ‘effervescent’, which Lexa tells her means ‘like air’.

Lexa is the warrior queen whose territory Clarke falls unwittingly into. Clarke thinks it suits her—she peers at the illustration of the woman with braids and leather armor, riding a horse with a sword in her hand and battle-paint on her skin and the slight downward turn in the corner of her lips is so similar to the way Lexa’s face contorts sometimes and she congratulates herself for putting two and two together. Ignoring the short yelps when she mistakenly tugs a stray curl, she clumsily threads Lexa’s hair into a braid the way Octavia taught her at recess. The outcome is less than good. Lexa bears more resemblance to the mangy cat that stalks the neighbourhood begging from scraps than a warrior-queen but she smudges wads of dirt over her eyes to fix it ignoring the way everything inside her goes warm and melty when she smiles—like the s’mores the make in the fire-pit at night in when Lexa is in pyjamas that smell like the Griffin’s detergent and socked feet.

Jasper and Monty grow restless, encroaching on the bubble Clarke has built for them with bored whines and Clarke thinks it’s lucky that Santa Claus never gave her a baby brother for Christmas two years ago because she got Lexa instead and Lexa smells much better than a boy. She assigns them characters anyway; the palace guards, and they search the ground for suitable ‘spears’ wielding gnarled sticks with as much menace as nine-year-olds can.

She kneels before Lexa’s throne—a fork in the twisted branches of a tree—with a circlet made from daisy chains in her hair, head bowed and launching into a wistful monologue of her harrowing journey to the ground, complete with fierce dragons, and a sea-witch who tried to barter unsuccessfully for her voice, while Monty and Jasper level their sticks at her in mock-fighting stances.

Back straight, Lexa blinks at her behind her crude war paint and Clarke thinks time stops.

Later—after they are called into lunch by Abby—they lie, sprawled out in the grass in the sticky heat of the day. Lexa has her bathing suit on beneath her shortalls instead of a t-shirt and her hair has dried in soft corkscrew curls around her hairline so that if she wasn’t peering so intently down at the book she has spread out before her, Clarke would reach out and wind one around her finger.

Instead, she feels like her body is humming with energy she doesn’t know what to do with.

Jake always likes to explain his work to her, he sits her on his lap and draws out maps of electrical circuits, explaining the mechanics of them and Clarke feels oddly similar to an overloaded circuit right now. Like she is plugged in to too many things and it’s making her unable to sit still.

Fingers splayed on the grass, she kicks up into a handstand, grinning at how Lexa looks upside down and the way she mouths the words she’s reading like it will help her remember them better. When she stands back up, the blood rushes back to her head and she peers over Lexa’s shoulder.

“What does ‘fealty’ mean?”

The word sits on the top line of the page in neat, Times New Roman font and it tastes so elegant rolling over Clarke's tongue she can’t help but ask.

Lexa cranes her neck to look up at her, squinting one eye against the glare of the sun. A swathe of sunburn tints her cheeks red. “It’s like a promise,” she poses like a question, grappling for the right explanation, “or a vow.” Clarke cocks her head. “It’s like when you make a promise to someone,” she tries again, pushing herself up onto her knees so that from her angle, Clarke blocks the sun, “like, ‘I’ll love you ‘till the end of time’.”

Clarke has to rally herself against the sudden burst of dizziness that hits her in the chest with the force of the tee-ball bat in gym class. Lexa kneels in front of her, freckled-nose and braided hair, and if Clarke thought time had stopped before, now it ceases to exist entirely. The world has become just them; this sticky-sweet moment that has wound itself so eagerly around her chest.

Fourth grade science class has brought rudimentary explanations of the universe—how everything they touch is made up of things called ‘atoms’ and how when she looks up at the sky, she has to imagine the biggest thing she can possibly comprehend and then quadruple it and it won’t be nearly a one billionth of what is really out there. To Clarke it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, the vastness of it all makes her head spin but the one thing she does understand is how the earth rotates around the sun because it’s similar to the way she thinks she rotates around Lexa.

“I love you,” she tells Lexa in earnest.

Lexa cocks her head, nose scrunched and finger curled into the spine of her book, marking the page. “Why.”

Clarke is taken back. Her and Octavia have been exchanging cheesy ‘I love yous’ since the second grade and there isn’t any real reason for it other than ‘that’s just what friends do’. She shrugs and purses her lips. “I don’t know,” she says plainly,  and amends the words Octavia tells her, “that’s just what best friends do."

* * *

Lexa doesn’t come with them in the summer between sixth and seventh grade.

With help from a contact at work her mom gets her to the top of the waiting list for a sleep away camp in the Maine and Lexa pulls up the website on the Griffin’s computer in the kitchen on Saturday night, scrolling through page after page of girls in tennis whites and soffe shorts, playing field hockey and toasting marshmallows around a campfire.

“I don’t really want to go,” Lexa says quietly, nose wrinkling at Clarke’s silence. Behind them Jake dices vegetables for tacos and a bespectacled Abby checks through Clarke’s book report for spelling eras but the comforting familiarity does nothing to stop Clarke souring at the blindside. “My mom thinks it will be good for me.”

Clarke is getting tired of what Lexa’s mom thinks will be good for her.

The woman is sweet and kind. She has heard her parents talking about how she ‘does her best’ for Lexa which she knows is what adults say when they are commiserating the hardships of single-parenthood but in her worst moments Clarke wants to shake the woman until she understands that Lexa’s quirks don’t make her ‘unique’ in the way that people talk about people who are different, they make her special.

So what if Lexa likes books better than people? Clarke likes girls better than boys and nobody is up in arms about it.

Sometimes it feels like Lexa’s mom aches for her to fit in more than Lexa does.

She can’t stop Lexa from going though, and the morning before they would usually leave for the lake sees her standing on Lexa’s front porch instead, with a horribly permanent pout on her mouth that she can’t shake. Lexa stands before her in sneakers, navy shorts and a tee with her camps logo printed on the front in bold white letters, her hair in two, tight braids and she looks so startlingly un Lexa-like stripped of her embroidered socks and circle of braids that when Clarke winds her arms around her neck in a dramatic goodbye, she finds herself mouthing a silent prayer to whomever is watching to put her best-friend back together again.

Hooking her chin over Lexa’s shoulder Clarke makes her promise to write weekly, hating the tears that seem to be squeezing their way out from beneath her eye-lids, and Lexa swears a solemn vow to do so, nose tucked into the crook of Clarke’s neck.

When it’s time to let go Clarke reluctantly untangles herself and retreats back to her own front yard, pressing herself against the white fence and waving vigorously as Lexa’s mom loads her and her trunk into the car and the Sedan inches its way out of the driveway.

“You’ll see her in August,” Abby reminds her, arms tucked over her daughter’s shoulders, “we can buy some stamps and you can write to her whenever you like.”

Clarke nods dumbly, trying not to let the whole affair feel like an awful betrayal.

When they make it to the lake two days later after a near silent five hour drive, it rains for the first time in as long as Clarke can remember.

In lieu of her best-friend, Abby has extended the invitation to her sister-in-law and her kids and Clarke stares at her cousins—five-year-old twins and a nineteen-year-old who is more interested in her boyfriend who insists on calling Clarke ‘squirt’ at age twelve-and-a-half than she is in Clarke—wondering how she is supposed to bestow the honour of her summers on people who are so clearly unqualified.

She wallows in the absurdity of it all as she is relegated to the bunk-room, watching with her stomach churning and a hot, angry thing she doesn’t care to understand clawing at her ribs as her Eden is invaded by her cousin and her Air Jordan wearing boyfriend with his stupid, unbrushed mop of hair. And even though Clarke is relatively sure a five story drop onto concrete wouldn’t do any damage to the twins—they’re dim-witted at the best of times and they paw at the t shirt Lexa bought her for her birthday like it’s something they are allowed to touch—her aunt decides it’s best if Clarke takes the top bunk, despite the fact that puberty is beginning to bring her her promised growth spurt and folding herself into the top bunk is a feat worthy of a contortionist.

The bout of water-logged days mean the boat stays in the shed and the twins grow restless in the sticky-wet heat. Clarke takes it upon herself to commandeer the role of ‘moody teenager’ two years too early and sprawls out on the wooden floors near the closed glass doors and punches the buttons of her Nintendo DS until Mario stops obeying her commands as the rain beats at the window panes. She thinks it’s pathetic fallacy, or whatever her English teacher had said when she explained the way authors use the ‘external environment’ to show a characters ‘internal emotions’, because if she could peel back a layer of herself and peer into her soul, she is sure the unhappy, slate-grey of the lake is what it would look like.

She hopes it isn’t raining on Lexa too.

* * *

They cut their trip short and Clarke is sitting with her chin in her hands when Lexa returns.

Her ponytail sticks to the nape of her neck where it is secured with an elastic, remaining stubbornly in her t-shirt and shorts even though Aurora invited them around for pizza and too cool off in the Blake’s pool—even the promise of seeing their newly acquired black Labrador puppy wasn’t enough of a bribe to get her to give up her post.

Her and Lexa have been exchanging letters once a week without fail over the eight weeks of Lexa’s session, detailing each other in on the smallest things. So much so that Clarke thinks she is the one who has been rotating through six activities a day and sounded off to sleep by Taps at precisely nine-twenty but it hasn’t been nearly enough. It’s stupid, but she needs to see Lexa again with her own eyes, as if to make sure she hasn’t disappeared into thin-air like a product of her imagination.

“Clarke!”

When she looks up, Lexa is standing three feet away from her, tanned and slightly breathless. Her mom’s Sedan is still inching its way into the drive, which means Lexa took a flying jump from the passenger door while the car was still in gear to find her. She’s wearing tiny, navy running shorts and her camp tee—slightly faded from almost daily washing and eight-weeks’ worth of sun—hangs off her teenage frame, knotted at her hip so that the hem rides up to reveal a long triangle of skin that makes a hot, aching thing build in the pit of Clarke’s stomach. Instead of deciphering it, she propels herself from her crouch on the porch to fling her arms around her best-friend’s neck, instantly recognising the way Lexa seems imperceptibly broader and stronger in her arms. Her shoulder blades flex beneath the press of Clarke’s hands as she draws her desperately closer and when Clarke prods a finger at the offending strip of skin at her waistband—teasing her mercilessly about her bare midriff—gone is the softness Clarke usually finds there when she curls into her in their shared bed at night.

Instead she is long limbs and lean muscle, her cheeks are dusted with sunburn and her hair is lighter, but the worst? Her freckles are on show and this time it isn’t Clarke who has put them there, but a girl by the name of Costia who’s neatly printed name is in the center of those scrawled on the back of Lexa’s shirt in permanent marker.

They lie on the mesh of Clarke’s trampoline after Lexa has hauled her trunk up to her room—her mom gave her four hours before she had to return next door and sort out her laundry—with cans of diet coke sweating in their palms as Clarke recounts the story of walking in on her cousin and her boyfriend being more intimate than strictly necessary on a family-friendly vacation.

“I almost barfed,” she giggles heartily, “I wanted to end it all right there but my mom talked me down from the ledge.”

“Oh, the dramatics,” Lexa sighs, grinning. She takes a sip then looks at Clarke seriously. “Was it really that bad without me?”

“I think you know the answer to that,” Clarke says softly. It wasn’t bad so much as it was empty, completely void of all of the things that made summer summer and Clarke has been left with the odd feeling that she is returning to school having not had a holiday at all.

Lexa screws her nose up and nods, “if it makes you feel better camp sucked too.”

“No it didn’t,” Clarke laughs, curling onto her side. 

Lexa piques a brow. “Are you call me a liar?” she accuses, feigning a hurt look. When Clarke shrugs, she flings a leg over her hips and pins her to the taut mesh of the trampoline with her arms by her ears and Clarke tries not to gasp at the electric shocks that skitter across her skin when they touch. Instead, she collapses into laughter, tipping her head to the side as Lexa knees her beneath the ribs, demanding ‘take it back, take it back’ in a low, teasing voice.

“Fine!” Clarke gaps, writhing against the assault, “fine!” She paws at the smooth length of Lexa’s thighs where they sit nestled against her waist. “I believe you.”

Clarke has a hard time pinpointing exactly what happens next.  

Somehow she raises her head and simultaneously, Lexa goes to lower hers. The result is a cacophonous collision of foreheads and noses; Clarke opens her mouth to whine in pain and finds a mouthful of Lexa’s bottom lip instead, eyes bulging as her pulse skyrockets to a speed she thinks surely signals a cardiac arrest.

Lexa makes a noise that resembles something close to an ‘oof’ then her fingers come to Clarke’s cheek in concern. “I’m sorry,” she smiles ruefully—it’s the same lopsided, word splitting smile she has always had and it does something to quell the stagnant uneasiness that has taken root in Clarke’s spine, if not the smouldering build up of who knows what in the pit of her stomach—and runs her thumb in a practiced motion over the short, white scar beneath Clarke’s eye.  

“It’s okay,” Clarke whispers. She fiddles with the edge of the tie-dyed bandana that is wrapped and knotted around Lexa’s wrist, trying not to focus on the impending sense of doom she feels as her body betrays her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some happy tween idiots falling in love on this not so happy day!

At Clarke’s behest, Lexa details her in all the things she forgot to tell her about camp; the color war, ‘swim the lake’ which Lexa finished in record time in the seventh week of her session after training every day with a group of twenty other girls, and Costia who lives in Connecticut and writes Lexa every week of the school term, hoping she will come back to camp next summer.

She reads one of the letters aloud one day after school as they sit on Clarke’s bed. Clarke is cross-legged with the back end of her pen in her mouth as she noodles through a workbook and Lexa hangs halfway off the narrow mattress with her wet hair in a drooping top knot, laughing at sentences Clarke thinks must be inside jokes. She has taken up swimming three days a week this year and Clarke won’t admit it but she loves going to the pool on Saturday mornings to watch her train.

A picture printed on glossy photo paper falls out of the bottom of the envelope when she looks. It’s of Lexa in a tie-dyed tee and tiny denim shorts, clinging to the back of a wiry redhead with the bandana Lexa now keeps pinned to her bedroom wall, tied around her head. Both girls are soaked and covered in what looks like colourful powder, set against the backdrop of a picturesque lake complete with an intricate dock system and sailboats anchored at the bank, the girls around them armed with plastic water pistols.

Clarke tries not to be too happy when Lexa announces one day in late May that she won’t be going back to camp this summer. She comes to the lake instead but wears her camp tee instead of her piñata socks and because of swimming, when they go to put on their usual life vests to go boating, Lexa’s doesn’t close properly and Jake teases her about ‘bulking up for the season’. She goes bright red and apologises profusely but Jake laughs it off, hanging it back on the hook and Clarke is antsy the entire way into town to buy a new one.

She blames it on the syrupy heat and the fact that on their second day they still haven’t gotten onto the water.

It’s neither of those things.

* * *

When Clarke is fifteen their double-bed shrinks.

It doesn’t literally shrink of course; Clarke is fully aware she is the one doing the growing. Aware of it too much maybe because the growth spurt may have been the start of it, it certainly wasn’t all that puberty had to offer and ending Freshman year in a C-cup was an uncomfortable experience to say the least.

Lexa has grown too—even more than she had when she returned home from camp two summers ago with the beginnings of abs beneath the skin of her midriff—as Abby prophesied she has well and truly grown into her lankiness and the extra inch or so she has on Clarke when they stand side-by-side.

The discovery that she doesn’t have to make a conscious effort to be touching Lexa when they sleep isn’t exactly an unpleasant one, but neither of them wear novelty pyjamas now or pug socks. It’s all Clarke’s middle school track t-shirt and foraged sleep shorts and sometimes Lexa doesn’t even wear pants at all, lamenting that the heat is stifling and sliding into bed in her camp tee and Calvin's that forces Clarke to banish blush-worthy thoughts from her head. In fact, she almost hates herself for thinking them in the first place.

Having both started at the same high school at the beginning of the last school year, it became easier and easier for Clarke to shove the unbidden feelings into the back of the proverbial closet and shut the door tight as they settled into the routine of pop quizzes and high school hierarchy. Lexa had swimming, Clarke had lacrosse. They tried to find each other in the cafeteria but with different lunch hours any sort of midday reunions had been hard to find. Other than Mr. Ramon’s fifth period math class, it was almost as if they were still at schools half a county away.

Summer had come as a breathless reprieve.

She lies next to Lexa in a bed that seems to be growing narrower by the day—wincing at the way Lexa’s toes brush the bottom of the mattress—and hates the way the world is encroaching on their little Eden.

* * *

They have a bonfire down at the lakefront, three houses down where the bank gives way to a patch of grainy sand. Abby has begrudgingly decided that at fifteen they are old enough and by the time Clarke and Lexa wander down after dinner

the flames are four feet tall and paint what they can see of the lake in the dusk in a hazy purple that looks syrupy and thick.

Clarke raided both of their suitcases to find an outfit, landing on a skimpy jean skirt that made Jake’s eyes bulge and Lexa’s ACDC t-shirt to make up for it—she takes a handful of the fabric and ties it into a knot above her belly button as soon as they get out of eyeshot of the house and she catches Lexa eyeing her fingers as she does it but doesn’t say anything. Lexa on the other hand is wearing her jean shorts and a baggy striped long-sleeve that she has tucked into her waist band. She is altogether different from the Lexa that Clarke met that Sunday morning but the string friendship bracelet that Clarke gave her after spending the better half of a month weaving it out of thread from Abby’s sewing kit sits faded and worn against the tan of her wrist like a reminder of how much they have grown.

When they arrive a bottle of cheap wine has already been cracked open and is being passed around, and open cans of beer sit wedged in the sand. Couples sit clinched together, lazy and drunk on one another in the way that the couples at school seem to be as they pin each other to the metal of the lockers or duck into empty classrooms when they think they are being inconspicuous and music is being wired in from somewhere, the generic kind from the radio that will leave Clarke humming for days.

They are greeted where they stand, fingers locked on the lip of the bank, by the flannel-wearing junior and Lexa drops her hand so quickly, it’s as if she has been scalded. Clarke shoots her a frown but doesn’t manage to catch her downcast eyes and tries not to let the sinking feeling that she has been plagued with for a while now pull her under.

Whenever she brings the sense of impending doom Abby assures her that people change as they grow but Clarke is never satisfied with that answer. Lexa isn’t supposed to change. They’re supposed to live next door to each other, and have summers together and visit each other at college and buy houses in the same town and still be here come July twenty-second when they are eighty years old and their children’s children have grown up, it’s a truth that has kept Clarke afloat since the moment she met her best friend. The sudden realisation that her mom is right is not one she signed up for at seven-years-old, but she can’t stop the thought that maybe it’s true.

Because, try as she might, she can’t seem to fathom living out the plans that they have made like they planned them anymore.

They sit side-by-side on the sand as the wine bottle is drained to play spin the bottle—Lexa passes diligently on her sip but when it reaches her, Clarke grasps the bottle by the neck and takes a swig of what tastes like a cheap version of what she had at her cousin’s twenty-first and backwash and winces.

“Don’t let Abby see you,” Lexa nudges her with an elbow, “you’ll get a lecture on liver health.”

Clarke laughs but can’t bring herself to reply.

The bottle is laid down and a junior with dirty-blonde hair and hard, angular features leans forwards to spin it—she has a scuffed leather jacket on over a tight-fitting tank that makes Clarke irrationally angry because in the heat of summer, there is no way she has put it on because of the cold.

The jacket is a calculated move.

She lets the bottle go with an inelegant flick of her wrist, shucking her sleeves up to where they hang against her forearms and Clarke watches it spin—the bottle-green blur like a harbinger of certain doom, panic flashing white hot down her spine as it lands on Lexa where she sits cross legged in the sand, leaning back onto her hands so that she exudes an aura of confidence Clarke knows it an act. She can read Lexa better than anyone. Even despite the way she has refused to look at Clarke almost since they sat down, Clarke can see the tension in the cords of her neck.

A boy lets out a low whistle and Lexa’s cheek go red. Leather-jacket grins cockily and crawls across the awkward circle they have made, planting her hands on either side of Lexa’s thighs so that she hovers over her, brow piqued as if to dare Lexa to say no.

When they kiss, Clarke looks away. Something ugly knocks on the underside of her skull and she has to pretend to find interest in the knotted hem of her shirt to stop herself from acting on it until a sharp cheer goes up and leather-jacket is pulling away to retreat back to her seat, wiping a thumb over her mouth as she does and Clarke tries not to think of the fact that her lip gloss now shines in the dip above Lexa’s top lip where the line of her scar sits.

When Clarke gets banished to a game of seven minutes in heaven an hour later, as immature as it is she has all the intentions of asking to sit it out. The boy she has been paired with is in her grade, with hair just on this side of too long and an oil-stained flannel on over dark wash jeans. He rubs his hand over the nape of his neck in what Clarke thinks must be a nervous tick and she is sure if she asked he would say yes without question but a desperate, restless thing grips her as they round a thatch of trees so that they are out of sight of the bonfire and when he does ask what she wants to do she pulls him by the collar of his flannel in a move that is supposed to be somewhat sexy but just ends up clumsy and awfully amateur. His eyebrows shoot to his hairline in what she hopes is pleasant surprise.

She’s kissed two boys before. The first, Octavia argues, hardly counts because in the sixth grade Miller went around kissing every girl in their class on a bet after Murphy started spreading the rumour that he saw him and Nate kissing in the boys bathroom. It’s a thought that seizes so terribly in her chest every time she thinks of it and she refuses think that it’s for any other reason than Miller is her friend and he took so much shit for those rumours that he didn’t come to advisory for a week. But it  puts Clarke on par with Octavia though so she includes the rushed half-peck in her tally whenever asked.

This, however, is altogether different.

She lets him prop her against the nearest tree, his hands sure on her waist as she sighs into the hesitant brush of lips on lips, their noses bumping as Clarke flushes, head spinning at the taste of what she thinks is cheap beer on his lips and she plants her hands atop of his to ground herself. He asks her if she’s ‘okay to do this’ and she nods eagerly and leans in again. She loves the way his steady frame feels beneath her hands when she curls her finger into the shoulders of his flannel. His hair comes untucked from around his ears and they tickle her forehead where their shallow breaths rally it between them. Every so often they stop to breathe, laughing softly into the stagnant night air—tinged with a cool wind off the lake and flushed cheeks from the heat of the fire—and Clarke lets the simplicity of it soothe away the confusion she feels when she thinks about Lexa. She doesn’t know this boy. She doesn’t know his name or where he lives. There aren’t any expectations that will come out of a stupid game of seven minutes in heaven other than maybe a smile at the end of the night and she feels exhilarated.

It’s easy.

She likes easy.

By the time they make it back to the bonfire it has been decidedly longer than seven minutes but Clarke feels ascended nonetheless. She ducks her head against the raised brows they receive as she eases herself back onto the sand—next to Lexa who keeps her eyes on the tips of her shoes like Clarke knows she does when something is bothering her—but at this stage in the night, couples have mostly paired off anyway so she takes their knowing looks with a grain of salt.   

Across the circle, leather-jacket smiles lazily at Lexa and on impulse, Clarke grabs flannel-shirt’s hand.

The rest of the bonfire is passed in restless silence on both of their behalves and when Abby texts to warn them of their curfew drawing ever near, flannel-shirt puts his number in Clarke’s phone under ‘Finn’ with the flame emoji next to it. She laughs at it when he does and waggles her eyebrows, but Finn insists that it’s nothing more than to remind her he is the boy she met at the bonfire so she takes his word for it because she’s sure he’s too sweet to think of it any other way.

He texts her a short ‘hi’ when they are halfway back to the house and, hands tucked into her armpits, Lexa scoffs at the burgeoning smile that tugs at her lips.

“What?” Clarke snaps, face turning stony. Aside from the gentle lap-lap of the lake on the bank, the cicadas and the occasional bird call, the lakefront is silent as they traverse the lengths of the two or three properties that lie between them and the Griffin’s house. The night air is thick with the heavy scent of smoke and all the way around the lake, lights sit in the windows of houses like tiny flames. She plants her feet into the grass and watches Lexa’s face contort into a horribly unaffected pout that is contrived at best, genuine at worst.

She can’t decide which is better.

She thinks the answer might be neither of them.

Lexa swallows hard. “Nothing,” she grumbles, finding a dip in the soil with the toe of her sneaker and digging into it. The rubber connects with something hard, making a low thunk every time she hits it. The sound grates on Clarke.

“It’s not—will you stop that!” Annoyed, she grabs Lexa by the forearm. Lexa blinks in shock, yanking her arm away and tucking it back into herself as they stare at each other hard, chests heaving. “It’s not nothing,” Clarke repeats, softer this time. “You haven’t looked at me all night.”

“Good that Finn couldn’t take his eyes off you then,” Lexa fires back.

Clarke frowns, willing the hot, rattling thing in her chest to stay where it is. “Is that what this is about? You’re mad because I kissed him?” When Lexa won’t answer, she takes it as a confirmation. “It’s not like you were such a saint either,” she retorts hotly, “you kissed that seventeen-year-old no problem!”

“Kissed, Clarke!” Lexa all but yells. “I kissed her! I didn’t suck face with her for half an hour!”

“Why do you care, Lexa!”

For a moment it looks like Lexa is going to yell again and Clarke braces herself for an impact that never comes. Instead, Lexa leans forwards and presses her lips to her and Clarke feels herself burning over and over again until she is sure there is nothing left to her, to the lake or the house or the town beyond it, other than ash. She can taste the syrupy-sweet strawberry lip gloss and roasted marshmallows and Lexa’s lips tremble when Clarke stills enough to feel it.

It’s over as quickly as it started and Lexa is staring at her—eyes red and bottom lip trapped between her teeth, fists wound so tightly in the hem of her shirt her knuckles are white like it will keep her from doing it again. She looks at Clarke like she’s imploring her to understand but Clarke is dizzy and she thinks the wine and cheap beer has gone to her head. She tries so hard her eyes water and her throat burns but all that she can see is the minute quiver of Lexa’s lip and the haze of the lake and it builds up in her chest until she’s gasping for breath and looking away.

When she looks up, Lexa has shoved her hands into the depths of the pockets of her jean-shorts and is retreating, leaving Clarke oddly on edge, like she’s riding a rollercoaster and waiting for the stomach-flipping drop that isn’t coming.

It’s off putting and a little bit nauseating and Clarke thinks she may just explode, or implode—she can’t remember the difference. She’s sure that if she were to ask, Lexa would give her the textbook definition and then some, but as they enter the house through the open French doors, Abby asks them if they had a good night and Clarke can’t bring herself to reply so she doesn’t. Instead she lets Lexa shower first and stands under the hot stream when it’s her turn determined to scrub the scent of burnt-wood and Finn’s cologne off of her.

She lays next to Lexa in painful silence, toes tucked into the end of the bed, hating the thought that they are outgrowing themselves.

* * *

It rains the next day and Clarke can’t explain the inherent restlessness that she feels.

It’s all encompassing, leaving an awful, sickly film on her tongue and she wishes so badly she can reclaim the things she said to Lexa and shove them back into the depths of her chest where she keeps her other ugly feelings but it’s too late now.

She feels like all of her dirty laundry has been aired out to dry and it’s in bright neon orange so that it’s impossible people haven’t seen it.

Abby tuts at the weather over serving them waffles pried out of the iron and sliding the syrup across the counter and Jake emerges from the bunk room with a stack of board games in tow. He doesn’t see the way Clarke’s stomach positively flips at the sight. She wants to spring away from the breakfast nook and burrow into her bed until she suffocates herself but Lexa is staring at her and something about it screws her to her stool.

They play monopoly until Clarke’s brain bleeds. She’s so eager to do  _ something _ that she drowns herself in properties and in turn, debts that she can’t pay off and bankrupts herself almost immediately and they listen to the old CD’s Jake fishes out from the dusty bookcase in the hall until she is sure the thing growing inside her will crawl up her throat and spray itself across the walls. She stands up from where she sits on the wooden floors, staring dumbly at her Clue cards like—the knife, the ballroom, the reverend—like they could be a tarot deck, legs screaming in protest. Her parents stare at her, a collective frown hidden beneath obvious concern, but Lexa just cocks her head and peers at her from the ground.

The rain beats at the windows, hard and sharp and with no intention of stopping considering the thickness of the heavy clouds that hem in the lake and the syrupy heat clogs up her lungs until she can’t breathe. She crosses the room with sure-footed intent, flinging open the doors, all trembling hands and pent up anger until she can feel the cold needles of rain on her face and her tee sags, waterlogged under the weight of it.   

Lexa’s fingers find the hem of her shirt, begging her back inside but she garbles something childish like ‘last one in’s the loser’ and takes off, across the deck, down the stairs and over the grass at terrifying speed, rain in her eyes and mud underfoot. Her hair is soaked and it hangs thickly off her lashes and somewhere beyond the loud thump-thump of her heart in her ears she thinks she can hear Lexa behind her, heavy big breathes and screaming at her to stop.

The hard wooden planks of the jetty come as a shock and they jar something loose in her chest. All of the terrible feelings come spilling out and she can barely see past the opaque sheets of rain but she launches herself off the end and this time, the ice-cold impact of the water does come.

She sinks like a stone fully clothed, water roaring in her ears and when her bare feet brush the silt at the bottom of the lake, she kicks off and surfaces a second later, blinking water out of her eyes to find Lexa standing at the edge of the jetty staring at her.

Suddenly, the memory of being in this exact position eight years ago hits her hard enough to knock the breath out of her—Lexa’s striped swimsuit, the tire-swing and the high-on-life feeling of elation when she surfaced to see Lexa cheering for her.

“Come on!” Clarke hollers over the rain, shielding her eyes with her hand as her legs fight to keep her afloat.

Lexa scoffs and shakes her head but unlike last night, Clarke thinks it’s a smile hiding beneath the curve of her lip. “You’re crazy!” she laughs in disbelief but she has this look—this lopsided, word-splitting look—on her face and Clarke knows she has her.

When she jumps in, the world somehow rights itself and Clarke is sure that the sun will come out again with the sheer force of Lexa’s smile.    

* * *

They go from Juniors to Seniors and, despite Clarke’s valiant effort to make it fit, they grow out of their double bed.

Jake offers to make up the bunk room but Lexa respectfully declines, electing to sleep in their usual room on the trundle bed and Clarke is not-so-silently grateful. She laments mournfully that Lexa needs to stop growing, poking her in all the soft places that make her squirm as they lie upside down on the too-small bed, as if wishful thinking will make them seven-years-old again.

Lexa is already thinking about college—she has her sights set on UPenn or even Harvard and while Clarke knows without a doubt she will get in, the thought of Lexa being hours away makes her chest uncomfortably tight.

“I won’t be any more than a couple of hours away,” Lexa hums, catching Clarke’s offending fingers in her hot hands. “Even if I get in to Berkeley it’s only a five hour flight.”

Clarke peers at her in faux-concern. Berkeley was a late comer on Lexa’s college radar but when the guidance counsellor suggested it might be a good idea to apply on the West Coast, she had taken it on board. Clarke is thinking more liberal like NYU or BU. She hasn’t told Lexa yet that her mom has a contact at CalArts and that—after surveying the portfolio she put together for an school exhibition—they said she was a shoe in for early admissions. If Lexa doesn’t get into Berkeley she isn’t sure she could make the five hour journey and leave her best friend a whole country away.

“You and I have a very different idea of what ‘only five hours’ means,” she groans, laying back on her back and tucking her head into her best friends shoulder. They still have senior year left to decide. Her mom tells her that that’s what it’s for but Clarke can hardly stand all of this not knowing and ‘end of an era’ bullshit that their principal had starting spouting in the last week of Junior year. As if they needed a reminder that next year might as well be the most important of their life. The opposite of invigorating her for her future, all it has done is make the hot ache inside her chest grow stronger; it’s almost over and Clarke can’t help but feel like she has less than nothing figured out.

“Will it really be that bad?”

It seems Lexa has a bad memory.

“Do you remember summer camp?” Clarke asks pointedly and when Lexa nods, she grins, “case and point. And college is longer than an eight-week summer session.” She settles when Lexa taps at her own shoulder again with her pointer finger; a wordless invitation that Clarke takes up eagerly. They haven’t talked about the kiss since the bonfire two years ago.

In fact they haven’t talked about it hard enough—almost made a point not to bring it up—that Clarke has managed to convince herself it didn’t happen.   

She plays with the soft hem of Lexa’s tee and closes her eyes against the smell of washing detergent and summer and roots far enough into Lexa’s shoulder that she is sure she can stay that way. Lexa laughs and she can feet the vibrations against her cheek, then even stronger when Lexa, in the midst of a soft chuckle says, “I love you.”

Clarke cocks her head at the odd cadence of her voice. “I love you too, dork,” she says because ‘that’s what best friends do’, “even if you are leaving me for a better climate.”

Lexa grumbles absently that ‘nothing is set in stone’ and ‘applications haven’t even come out yet’ but settles beneath Clarke regardless. They eke as much as they can out of the evening before Lexa has to retreat to her trundle bed and Clarke turns the light out, feeling aloof and untethered without the warm mass of Lexa’s body next to her.

Usually she longs for the quiet moments—the nights she spends with Lexa in their Eden of floral sheets and patterned wallpaper but instead, she finds herself restless and searching for something she isn’t quite sure how to find.

She wants to go to into senior year on solid ground, not feeling like she is wading through molasses but the truth is, as the summer wanes on, she isn’t any closer to finding her feet. They swim and sunbathe and eat sticky marshmallow straight from their sticks—Lexa gets it stuck above her lip and Clarke leans over to wipe it off with her thumb.

Jake takes them out on the boat and Abby comes with them into the dinky little eatery in town that has outdoor picnic tables and Lexa spams her phone with pictures of Clarke in a summer dress and a straw hat, hair in a single, twisted braid. It’s all wonderful and quintessentially summer but it isn’t what she wants.

While Lexa spreads herself out on a blue and white blanket with next year’s reading—it’s not like she didn’t read ‘The Great Gatsby’ in the eighth grade on a whim because Clarke liked the cover art depicting the ‘eyes of God’—Clarke finds Finn. They stand in the woods, not far from where they kissed the first night at the bonfire, with fervent hands on each other and weird energy rattling in her chest. Her heart isn’t in it when he places hot mouthed kisses along the column of her neck and she lets him ruck her shirt up over her chest just because he looks so earnest when he asks her. She knows it’s not at all a good reason to—as mortifying as it was her mom had been  _ thorough _ when she sat Clarke down at the beginning of sophomore year to give her the talk and although it was more clinical than touchy feely she did make sure to instil a sense of its importance in her. It wasn’t that she shouldn’t be in charge of her own body, it was just that she should be careful who she is in charge of it with.

But all that feels so utterly faraway right now, like a picture just out of focus.

He smells like Axe body spray and even though she’s sure neither of them are wearing it, the sticky scent of sunscreen hangs in the air. She wrinkles her nose against it as he sucks down her collarbones and frowns at the hard, scrape of teeth, tugging him away by the hair at the nape of his neck with a sharp hiss.

“Ow,” she breathes.

“Sorry,” he huffs, flashing her a brilliant smile. He roots his hands back under her shirt. “I almost ignored your text when I got it this morning,” he hums against her, “I nearly deleted your number after the bonfire. Atom said you were too good for me and that you’d never text me back.” He raises his brows as if to say ‘let’s show him’ and Clarke is immediately repulsed.

“Finn,” she whines, high pitched and breathless as she tries to pull his hands off her. His fingers catch on her belt loop and she unhooks his thumb before giving his chest a light shove. “I need to go.”

He frowns. “But—”

“I have to get back,” she shakes her head decisively. “Bye Finn.”

There’s no other way to describe what she feels as she hikes back up the back to the house than ‘icky’. She has enough sense in her head to know for sure that she is anything but a summer conquest and, she thinks, if Finn wants to impress Atom so badly maybe he should feel  _ him _ up instead.

Lexa is where she left her in her short-sleeved linen shirt and denim shorts, hair in its topknot and glasses perched on her head as she skims Gatsby’s tragic death and laments over Daisy’s poor character choices. She quells the itchy dizziness within Clarke immediately and as soon as she makes it over, she collapses down on the grass, rolling easily onto her back and landing her hands on her stomach with a heavy sigh.

“Boys suck,” she decides.

Lexa blinks at her, blank faced.

“I’m gay,” she says, just like that. It’s as simple as if boiled down to a definition, poetic as Gatsby’s ending and Clarke opens her mouth to say something, then closes it again. She doesn’t know what she is supposed to say other than what they are told in health class but all of that seems too wrong when faced with Lexa looking at her like this.

“Okay,” she says, because there’s really nothing more than that.

Lexa has always been hers. A three letter word isn’t going to change that—she hopes against hope that Lexa didn’t believe it would—but there are tears clinging to Lexa’s lashes like dew on the spiderwebs they used to find under the picnic table when they were seven and the sight sticks in Clarke’s chest, so painfully it’s all she can do to pull her into a hug. She hooks her arm over Lexa’s shoulder and pulls her into her chest, letting Lexa root into her shoulder until she thinks nothing could separate them. “Oh, Lex,” she coos, “you’re okay,” and more than that, “we’re okay.”

When Lexa pulls back she’s trembling. The breeze is hot today but Lexa looks as if she is in the middle of a tundra in a swimsuit because her shoulders shake and her chin quivers and is it bad of her to think that right now she is the prettiest that Clarke has ever seen her?

“Thank you for telling me,” she whispers.

Lexa nods, her chin wobbles.

“How long have you known?”

Clarke doesn’t know why she asks other than that it seems of the utmost importance. It’s awfully dramatic but she feels like her entire life will rest on this moment, like she will look back at it through the lense of experience to either wallow or regret or point to it as the thing that changed everything. She only hopes it’s the latter. Lexa’s eyes are seven different colours through the prism of the tears held captive at her lash line and it’s all Clarke can do not to let it take her breath away.

“Two years.”

Clarke feels the air evacuate her chest. She feels like she is on fire, her body tingles and she is relatively sure she isn’t a whole person—not yet at least, not with Lexa looking at her the way she is—but half of one, made of nothing but open nerve endings and raw want. It all knots inside of her and swells until it is impossible to ignore.

Clarke kisses her.

She grasps Lexa by the shoulder, the linen of her shirt crushed against the heat of her palm, and leans in with her mouth open and a fervent kind of desperation she hasn’t kissed anyone with in her life. It’s heavy and bold and oh so desperate. Lexa’s brows shoot to her hairline before coming back down as her fingers find the hem of Clarke’s tee and fist in it like she needs something to keep her from inevitably floating off into space.

Clarke knows the feeling.

It feels like every single moment of her life has led to this point, and now that she’s here, she is sure she isn’t. Her hand comes up to rest on Lexa’s jaw and she takes stock of what she knows: the colour of Lexa’s eyes; the shape of the scar above her lip; how she scrunches her eyes when she is happy and throws her head back when she laughs, and when she is troubled by something, she gets a look on her face that is both devastating and beautiful.

It’s there now, caught in the place between her eyebrows.

It makes Clarke nervous.

She feels clumsy and inelegant but Lexa tangles their fingers together. She tastes like summer and everything good, Clarke feels drunk on it.

“I love you,” she whispers because that’s not what best friends do.

“I love you,” Lexa says.

The entire world feels encapsulated into a heartbeat Clarke thinks it might just be her last.

Maybe she doesn’t like easy after all.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr if you want to ([@clarketomylexa](https://clarketomylexa.tumblr.com/)) otherwise thanks for reading!


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